Viewer pane used to show pdfs and excel docs

Help & Support
1

Hi all,

I used to be able to view pdfs and excel docs in viewer pane, but now they load just icons. I know I must be missing a small setting somewhere. Can you point me in the correct direction?

Thanks

2

Can you view either document type in File Explorer's viewer pane?

If they don't work there either, try repairing the related software. e.g. If Adobe Reader is your PDF viewer, repair or reinstall it and it will usually fix the preview handler it installs. If Microsoft Word is installed, repair it and it will often fix the Word preview handler.

Also, check the ActiveX + Preview + Office + Web plugin lists as viewers for the different types under Preferences / Viewer / Plugins.

If you're using very old versions of Adobe Reader or Office, you may find things work by adding PDF to the Internet Explorer (32-bit) line in the plugin, and if you enable the Microsoft Office (legacy) line in the plugin. Neither are recommended, though; they were both set up that way by default in the past, but there are much better ways to view both types of documents now.

3

Thanks, making some progress after a repair. It does show excel now. and both show in File Explorer.

When I try PDFs, they now show up like this:
%PDF-1.5
%âãÏÓ
xref
6 62
0000001446 00000 n
0000001555 00000 n

This is Acrobat XI on a Windows 10 64bit pro.

4

The PDF is being shown as plain text, which means there probably isn't a (working) PDF preview handler installed.

Unless things have changed, Acrobat is not a PDF viewer, only a PDF editor. You may need to install Adobe Reader as well.

5

Ok, for what it's worth, The way I got it to work for pdfs is to use the old timey .pdf entry to internet explorer 32 bit.